Friday Night

Friday night is mostly about hearing people’s pitches and creating teams. You won’t really spend a lot of time building anything on Friday, but it’s a good chance to meet your team and get set up. Here are a few things to think about:

Pitching
You don’t have to pitch anything if you don’t want to. It is totally cool to come and join a team, however if you have always had an idea that you wanted to see turned into reality this is certainly a great chance to pitch that. Try to come a little early and chat with people about your idea. This should help you refine it a bit more and also help to clarify how you explain it. You aren’t bound to your pitch after you make it either, if it isn’t something that peaks other’s interest (which happens, I think it’s happened to me on all my pitches in the past, ha!) don’t worry about it, it’s totally cool to join a different team.
You get 1 minute to pitch with seems like a lifetime and a nanosecond all at the same time. You want to quickly explain the problem you are solving, or the premise of what you want to build. Take about 45 seconds for that and about 15 seconds for explaining what you are able to do and what you need on your team to bring that idea to reality.
One final note – focus on the smallest thing that you can build in the weekend. It is awesome to want to change the world, but you aren’t going to likely accomplish that in a weekend. So focus on a a small piece of the puzzle that you can build and get people to use by the end on the weekend. Your product can expand from there, but start small.

Forming your team
After the pitches are done you are going to have the chance to join a team, or form your team. After the teams have been formed you want to spend the rest of friday night getting to know your team, refining you idea a bit and getting ready to build the rest of the weekend. Generally this is the best time to download and install the tools that you’ll need for the weekend. i.e. set up a repo (git, mercurial), download the software and frameworks you are going to need. The last thing you want is to spend half of Saturday downloading XCode or installing ruby, the more of that you can get prepped on Friday night the better. Also take a few minutes to map out your plan for the weekend and what each person on your team is going to be working on. A lot of this will evolve as the weekend goes by, but if you can set a little plan to begin with it will definitely help.

Saturday

Saturday has one basic mission: build build build build build. You want to spend as much of Saturday building the meat of your project so that you can leave Sunday for refining and fixing things. Most of the code should be written and design/art should be done on Saturday. If you are doing content most of that should be written Saturday. And if you are working on marketing and UX this is when you want to start to talk to potential users/customers to start to refine both the experience and how to best get it into people’s hands.

Gather your team together a few times throughout the day to check in on your progress. See where everyone is at, show off the bits that you’ve built so far, and refine/revise depending on if you are ahead or behind schedule. You want to make sure you have something built for people to see on Sunday night.

While the weekend is about building a product and getting it launched, make sure to take a few brakes throughout to meet with some of the other teams and see what they are building. The weekend is about building cool things, but also meeting cool people.

Sunday

Sunday has two main parts: more building/refining and the demos.

Building/Refining
As I mentioned about Saturday you want to be able to have Sunday for as much refining as possible. There are always bugs that come up that take longer to fix than possible, and as you start to piece everything together you will realize that tweaks need to be make to keep it all cohesive. Your focus for Sunday should be on the refining and tweaking of the project as much as possible. Try to give yourself a little bit of time at the end of the day to practice your demo a couple of times. You don’t want to spend all afternoon on it, but make sure you have run through it as a team a few times and are ready.

Demoing
You’ll get about 5 minutes to demo what you built. Like pitching on Friday this can seem like eternity and no time at all, all at the same time. You want to spend 1 minute of your time telling what the problem and/or premise of what you built is, then spend the next 4 minutes showing off how you fixed it. Don’t worry if you need to put vapourware in a couple spots to make your demo look okay. You want to show off the core functionality and can gloss up a couple parts if need be. Also don’t spend time demoing things that aren’t important like sign-up forms. It is super easy to spend 2 minutes of your demo trying to get your passwords to match on the signup form, and it really isn’t important for people to see. Just have an account logged in and ready to show off the cool stuff. (Note: if your product is a revolutionary new way to do signup forms then ignore that last bit, lol).

Lastly, It is going to be a super fun weekend filled with meeting new people, building cool things, and being inspired as to what you can build in a few short days if you put your mind to it. Have a ton of fun and enjoy the process. We’re excited to see everyone there!

1. Your idea is likely wrong, but you won’t know until you try it – thus get out and do it so you can find out what works and what doesn’t.

2. Do the smallest executable step possible so you don’t put all of your resources into attacking one idea. That will give you resources to change directions as you learn what is working and what isn’t.

Great Video, Check it out:

Now to actually start blogging…